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The Calhoun Colored School (1892–1945) was a private boarding and day school in Calhoun, Lowndes County, Alabama, about southwest of the capital of Montgomery. Founded in 1892 by Miss Charlotte Thorn and Miss Mabel Dillingham in partnership with Booker T. Washington, the Calhoun Colored School was first designed to educate rural African-American students according to the industrial school model. The school sponsored a land bank that helped 85 families buy land. It created a joint venture with the county to improve a local road so farmers could get their products to market. As the school developed, it raised its standards, created a large library, and offered more of an academic curriculum. The principal's house, the only surviving original building, has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places in recognition of the school's importance in the history of education of African Americans. ==History== In 1891, the United States was still adjusting to the aftermath of the American Civil War, Reconstruction and the Financial Panic of 1873. Many African Americans living in the rural South worked under the sharecropping system. The dependence of southern agriculture on cotton, whose price continued to drop, contributed to difficulties in the South making economic progress. African Americans, then called "colored" or "Negro", living in Calhoun (Lowndes County), Alabama were subject to white political and social domination although they comprised the majority of the county's population. Conservative white Democrats had regained power in the state legislature and begun to pass statutes that stripped African Americans from voter rolls or made elections so complicated they were effectively disenfranchised. In 1901 the state passed a new constitution with provisions for requirements for voter registration that suppressed voting by blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites.〔Glenn Feldman, ''The Disenfranchisement Myth: Poor Whites and Suffrage Restriction in Alabama,'' Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004, pp. 135–136〕 Lowndes County, in the Black Belt, had been an area of large cotton plantations before the Civil War. Devoted to agriculture, in 1890 the county had the highest proportion of Negroes to whites of any in Alabama. Most blacks worked as sharecroppers cultivating cotton. Booker T. Washington, then president of Tuskegee Institute, spoke at Hampton Institute (his alma mater) to recruit teachers to help with Alabama education. He told of the people of Calhoun and their great desire to educate their children. Two Hampton teachers, Charlotte Thorn and Mabel Dillingham, white women from New England, responded to his plea for help. They traveled with Washington to Calhoun to find a site and get a school built and operating.〔name="Alabama Review">〕 Thorn and Dillingham used their extensive networks among families and friends to raise funds and receive donations of all kinds. They also used the Hampton Institute publication, ''The Southern Workman,'' to publicize frequent articles about the school and aid fundraising. Thorn's nephew, Sidney Dickinson, spent time with his parents assisting at the school during his youth.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Greenville County Museum of Art )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Calhoun Colored School」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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